Customer Reviews

Touching Distance

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This is an absolutely wonderful book and a fascinating, historically accurate, story. It is beautifully written, and, like a good book should, lingers in memory long after the last page is turned. So many riveting elements, from the descriptions of puerperal fever to the dawning, awful realization about how the disease is carried from woman to woman. The tensions in the relationships among the key characters are drawn with realism and force.

An extraordinary story, beautifully written. I can't imagine a more gripping account of a forgotten hero of public health -- Alexander Gordon of Aberdeen, Scotland. The author sculpts a remarkably rich and complicated holograph of this courageous and driven medical doctor who recognized that childbed fever, a disease which terrified pregnant woman before the advent of antibiotics, was an infectious, transmittable process. That this fever still constitutes a killer in the developing world makes this historical work resonate with profound political intensity.